Longing for the day ...

Australian Music In Tune?

Puh-lease! Will someone wake the major music industry bodies up?? This is getting ridiculous.

How out-of-touch do they ant to seem? This initiative is pathetic, and a PR disaster. It's the sort of idea you'd expect a bunch of pissed footballers to come up with, laugh about and then be glad they didn't carry out.

To start with, you don't make things like this just downloadable, you stick them on places like Youtube and allow people to syndicate them as embedded objects. Duh! Spend the money on your bandwidth, it's trivial. Make it accessible and transparent and you might have some hope that they'll engage with it.

Second, you don't give an initiative that so obviously smacks of desperation a name that can be so easily parodied. In Tune? More like Out of Touch. At least if they'd gotten some genuine indies involved, instead of a parade of the bland and banal crap they've been propagating recently (sorry, Barnesy, but your interesting days are behind you. Ditto the Veronicas) they might have had some credibility.

Third, what? You can swap our propaganda for free (for non-commercial purposes!) but not the stuff you're interested in? What kind of message is that? Confusing? Ambiguous? Cynical? Surely not ...

Fourth, this site shows yet again that they simply don't get the new technologies. The names on this page should all link the bands/acts/artists. There should be discussion boards hanging off the site that tie in with events linked to viewing the damn doco. Get the "stars" actually in touch with people. If you want to generate empathy, anonymic distance doesn't cut the mustard - it just reinforces the perception of arrogance and insincerity.

I could go on but I'd like to watch the thing before I do. Maybe there's something magical about seeing people with the full backing of an Multinational Corporation reassure me that they suffer when I do something that my computer is designed to do that will cause a change of heart ...

Yeah, right!!

The demise of Sonific

It's sad to see that another experiment in approaches to independent music has gone the way of the dodo. Sonific, like a lot of Gerd Leonhard's stuff, was a great idea cruelled by harsh reality.

Gerd bills himself as a "media futurist", which I take to mean that he dreams up a whole bunch of stuff about what the media might be like and then tries to see how each of these futures might come into being. It's a bit like horse racing - any of the horses might be a winner, but which one will it be? Gerd's personal gamble has lost the first leg, though it might come back yet.

Gerd is one of the proponents of the "Music like Water" thesis - a nice idea that is simply impractical in any real sense. Music is NOT like water. People value it for highly personal reasons, not utilitarian ones; not all music is as good as other music; and not everyone needs music to the same extent (or at all!). And so on. Charging for music on the same basis as charging for water will not capture revenue from the sources of value (fans), and will not necessarily distribute the proceeds proportionately to the creators of cultural capital (artists). To suggest otherwise is dreaming of pies in the sky made of sand ...

That said, there's a lot of good stuff in Gerd's "Music 2.0" book and his "End of Control" essays - well worth a read, as long as you keep your filters in place.

And remember that it's all very well to have dreams about how things might be, but to make them that way you first have to deal with how things actually ARE.

MusoWiki stage 1 is complete!

One of the reasons I have not been posting much lately is because of the amount of time I been spending building www.musowiki.net. I'm pleased to announce that the Global component of the site is now complete and ready for entries.

Of course, all I have to do is repeat that effort for every country, state and city in the world! Help? Anyone??

One step at a time ...

Literacy in Vanuatu

Just got word of this worthy cause. It's raising funds for Vision Generation Qld, this year specifically to improve literacy in Vanuatu. Unfortunately, I'll be at Gumby's wedding, so I can't get there ...

Come on all you crazy Queenslanders! Go have some fun and help others at the same time - all it costs you is money.